This retrospective, exploratory investigation examined the types of target words that 30 children with word-finding difficulties (aged 8 to 12 years) had difficulty naming and the types of errors they made on these words. Words were studied with reference to lexical factors that might influence naming performance: word frequency, age of acquisition, familiarity, and lexical neighborhood. Findin...

Lexical frequency and phonological neighbourhood density have been found to influence vowel production. This experiment investigated the effect of lexical frequency and phonological neighbourhood density on vowel space expansion in words and nonwords. Twenty speakers produced words varying in phonological neighbourhood density and word frequency and produced nonwords that varied in neighbourhoo...

The interpretation of written Mandarin monosyllables presented in tonally unspecified pinyin was investigated for 22 native speakers. Results showed a preference for high relative lexical frequency and, to a lesser extent low homophone density candidates, with some interaction between these two factors: where one candidate in a homophone cohort had a particularly high frequency, cohort density ...

This study investigated how lexical access in naming tasks (picture naming, naming to open-ended sentences, and naming to category exemplars) might be influenced by different lexical factors during adolescence and adulthood. Participants included 1075 individuals, ranging in age from 12 to 83 years. Lexical factors examined included word frequency and familiarity, age of acquisition, neighborho...

In this paper, we describe an alternative to the kappa statistic for measuring intercoder agreement. We present a model based on the assumption that the observed surface agreement can be divided into (unknown amounts of) true agreement and chance agreement. This model leads to confidence interval estimates for the proportion of true agreement, which turn out to be comparable to confidence inter...

Research hitherto has tended to show that, like vocabulary errors, wrong collocations are often due to transfer from L1, and hence that greater typological difference from the target language leads to more serious collocational errors. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the collocational errors of Swedish and Chinese students. 100 university students from each environment wrote a short essa...

We address the problem of automatically processing collocations—a subclass of multi-word expressions characterized by a high degree of morphosyntactic flexibility—in the context of two major applications, namely, syntactic parsing and machine translation. We show that parsing and collocation identification are processes that are interrelated and that benefit from each other, inasmuch as syntact...

This paper explores the collocational behaviour and semantic prosody of near synonyms from a cross-linguistic perspective. The importance of these concepts to language learning is well recognized. Yet while collocation and semantic prosody have recently attracted much interest from researchers studying the English language, there has been little work done on collocation and semantic prosody on ...

This paper combines a corpus-based study of noun+verb collocations with an attempt to distinguish compositional, regularly formed compounds from lexicalised ones. We claim that morphologically regular, compositional compounds share most of their collocational preferences with their compound heads, whereas lexicalised compounds have their own collocational preferences, distinct or only marginall...